PLEASANTON, California - April 5, 2012 -- Percona LLC, the company that makes MySQL faster and more reliable, today announced the availability of Percona Toolkit 2.1, the latest release of the company’s open source administration tools for MySQL and Percona Server. The new version allows administrators to change schemas without scheduling downtime, thus increasing system availability and administrator productivity.

Percona Toolkit enables administrators to simply and reliably automate complex, tedious tasks to eliminate error-prone steps and avoid unintended consequences, such as increased system load. The tools distill expertise gained through thousands of hours of experience on tens of thousands of mission-critical database servers, and they are backed by formal software engineering and more than 4,000 unit and integration tests to ensure the highest quality. The new tool, pt-online-schema-change, helps administrators perform schema changes (ALTER TABLE) without the need to schedule downtime.

For most operations, MySQL does not provide any means for an online schema change, which means that a table must be locked for the duration of the operation, causing application downtime. By eliminating the need for this downtime, the latest version of Percona Toolkit increases administrator productivity, increases availability, and further extends the suitability of MySQL for mission-critical applications.

Quotes

“Percona Toolkit continues to be the most effective MySQL tools available for automating complex administrative tasks and avoiding the common types of errors associated with manual management, including poor performance and system crashes. With version 2.1, we have added the ability to perform schema changes without scheduling downtime, a critical asset for mission-critical applications.”